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The Black Ops, released around Halloween 2007, are a separate organization on Auraxis not affiliated with any of the three empires. Since 2008, Members of The Black Ops are selected by random in-game. Once in Black Ops, players' health is raised to 1000, their stamina is raised to 500, and they are allowed to use any weapon in the game, including a special melee weapon the "Fusion Blade". Members are restricted to standard or reinforced armor and cannot communicate or team with any other faction. Black Ops are always assimilated on "old" Oshur, with all bases neutral, indicating Black Ops controlled bases.

The Black Ops are not so much a fourth empire, but an anti-empire. It is a secret faction that has existed in Auraxis for some time now, but for some reason or another has begun to come out of hiding and take action against the three empires. Their motives are currently unknown. They are small in number but have a method of enhancing their abilities as soldiers, and that makes them formidible foes.

Any player will be able to enlist in the Black Ops, although for now the ability will be sanctioned by a GM. Once the player enlists, he will no longer be a part of his own empire. His sanctuary will become inaccessible and his old empire will become hostile towards him. His only allies will be other players in the Black Ops. He will only be able to communicate to Black Ops players, and will lose all outfit and command chat as well as any communication with his old empire. Instead, he will be given access to a global Black Ops chat that only other Black Ops players can see. Players of different empires can join the Black Ops, team up in squads, and work together to battle all empires at once.

The Black Ops work in small groups, but make up for their lack of numbers in other ways. Their biochemistry has been improved, and health and stamina are greatly increased (1000 and 500 points respectively) and their stamina regenerates at double the rate. Their minds have been enhanced, and they have the knowledge required to use most objects that they could not use normally (similar to training).

There are disadvantages though. Black Ops cannot use the Infiltration Suit or MAX armor. They are not allowed to pilot BFR units.

The Black Ops do not capture bases; instead, they neutralize them. Neutralizing a base does not require a link and there is no timer; it happens instantly (we are still debating over a way to limit this ability). The base is neutral to Black Ops as much as other empires, it is not considered a friendly SOI. However, Black Ops can pull equipment from neutral terminals. In addition, since they are an amalgam of all empires, they will have access to all empires' equipment. They never own a base and do not get facility benefits from them, but they can always pull Tech vehicles and ancient technology equipment.

Black Ops spawn at neutral facilities. Or, they may spawn at the "Black Ops Headquarters", a space station from where they can launch drop pods similar to the HART shuttle. Black Ops can travel freely throughout Auraxis. They are unaffected by empire or cavern locks, and are only prevented from entering the three sanctuaries.

The Black Ops are a force to be reckoned with, but because of this power, no experience or award progress will be given to a player while they are a part of it. However, any player not in the Black Ops that manages to kill a Black Ops player will receive more experience for the kill.

Enlisting in Black Ops is only temporary. The GM that lets you in will give a time limit, which can be viewed in your character info window. Once that time is up, you will revert back to your old empire. You may also leave manually at any time by clicking a button next to the time display.

I definitely didn't play long enough to deal with that Black Ops stuff, but it sounds like they were added to "force" combat to locations around the map since anyone can cap neutral bases. That actually sounds like a lot of fun.

As far as the BRF discussion is going, the reason they were retarded was because they were invulnerable to most other vehicles due to their shield, which could only be brought down using small weapons (or by standing inside fo the shield), all of which were almost completely useless at actually killing the BFR itself. In short, it took more than 2 people to bring down a vehicle operated by 2 people. If the other faction decided to roll out 7-8 BFRs at a time it almost eliminated the little outdoor combat the game still had.

I have a lot of great memories from Planetside, and none of them are from a post-BFR time.

I definitely didn't play long enough to deal with that Black Ops stuff, but it sounds like they were added to "force" combat to locations around the map since anyone can cap neutral bases. That actually sounds like a lot of fun.

As far as the BRF discussion is going, the reason they were retarded was because they were invulnerable to most other vehicles due to their shield, which could only be brought down using small weapons (or by standing inside fo the shield), all of which were almost completely useless at actually killing the BFR itself. In short, it took more than 2 people to bring down a vehicle operated by 2 people. If the other faction decided to roll out 7-8 BFRs at a time it almost eliminated the little outdoor combat the game still had.

I have a lot of great memories from Planetside, and none of them are from a post-BFR time.

Meh you could rape BFRs at release with a 2 man lib crew, after they nerfed them you could rape them even harder. Post-nerd a full drop of AP bombs would leave them crippled and completely worthless. Of course, the problem there is that most people didn't care to learn to use a liberator for anything but skillless high-alt Anti-inf spamming. Which is a shame because the liberator was the best thing EVER in PS.

Mossies and the limited tail-gunner firing arc always made Libs feel pointless to me; probably because I flew a mossy everywhere.

I still think it would have been a lot cooler to water down the Lib a bit and make faction specific 2-man bombers that felt more like Reavers. But then again, I always wanted them to try and get rid of all the common-pool stuff which was something they didn't think was overly important for whatever reason.

Mossies and the limited tail-gunner firing arc always made Libs feel pointless to me; probably because I flew a mossy everywhere.

I still think it would have been a lot cooler to water down the Lib a bit and make faction specific 2-man bombers that felt more like Reavers. But then again, I always wanted them to try and get rid of all the common-pool stuff which was something they didn't think was overly important for whatever reason.

The tailgun arc wasn't a problem with a experienced crew. Mossy on your ass? Face-down-ass-up and a good tailgunner could do them in in short order. It was one of the few multi-crew vehicles that really benefited from crew that were experienced and who flew together often though. Also, you gotta know that if they had done faction specific bombers the TR version would have required half a dozen crew ;).

I would have liked Libs being added much more if the pilot had no gun. As bombers they make an interesting addition to the tactical layout of a battlefield, but that ridiculous pilot gun kind of detracted from what I'd call their "primary" objective.

I loved driving that Magtank thing. The hovering one. It was so great at running people over (more effective than using its gun even) that they nerfed its plowing ability shortly before I left the game

But before that it was hilarious to just zoom around and run squads over in my purple little tank

I hated the magmower so much.

I'm hoping they can pull it off, but I am ye of little faith when it comes to these things.

Let me start by saying that {if done correctly} a Planetside sequel could be fucking fantastic.

I loved the original Planetside, despite its flaws, but that's largely because I played with a small group of friends from real life. We were in a really good Outfit of about 20 people. We weren't big enough to wage the huge wars, nor did we want to due to the lag that was a side effect of any battle over about 50 people.

We specialized in taking and holding towers, providing aerial drops and support, and advance base capturing before the large defense armies could arrive. We typically played hit and run style and never stuck around long enough to get steamrolled by the larger forces.

I played as Vanu, back when Vanu was the worst of the 3. We were the underdogs and we loved our strafing tanks.

But Planetside had a TON of flaws, which I would need to see addressed before ever considering paying money for a sequel.

-- Smaller zones/continents. There is way too much open space in Planetside. I'd estimate that about 90% of the land mass never gets used.

-- Naval combat. I was one of the people who were a large advocate of adding faction specific boats and incorporating naval warfare into the game as the first expansion. What we got instead were caves and other shit that nobody at all wanted.

-- Better faction balance. There was always a flavor of the week. At launch, it started with the TCs and their shotguns that they could snipe with. Then it rotated to the TRs and their pounders. My chosen race, the VS were the third in line and lasher spam caught on huge for a while. Before playing a Planetside sequel, I would need to know that the game is actually well balanced and that the devs aren't gonna make knee jerk reactionary changes and screw the whole game up with every patch.

-- Incentives to defend bases. The way it went in PS1 is that defenders had literally zero incentive to stick around and actually hold a base. Instead, what you had was a game of musical chairs. While one team was capturing a base, the other team was abandoning it and hitting another base elsewhere. The best battles actually took place at guard towers, because holding those actually mattered.

-- They need to revamp the entire leveling system to be more modern. Talent trees like in WoW would be one option. Customizable loadouts like in Modern Warfare would be another option.

-- They should also adopt the Squad system from the Battlefield series, where you can spawn in on your squadmates. This would encourage grouping and sticking together, rather than lone wolfing it which happened a whole lot back in the early days of PS when everyone would just grab their TR pounder mech suit and rack up huge kill counts on their own.

My main issue with Planetside was that, as a casual player, there was very little there to make me care about winning or losing a specific skirmish; wait for a shuttle, get dropped near a base that looked like all the other bases, shoot mens and win or lose. Don't get shit for either scenario.
That, and the lack of anything to do outside of straight PVP. I realize most people hate mixing PVE and PVP elements, but with the game pretty much simply revolving around taking meaningless objectives it just felt like I was playing an arena shooter on larger maps. It would've been nice to be able to do something when you don't feel like killing people that day.

my glory days was when i played with yoshua here on the forums, we both were vanu and i was a magrider pilot. those were the days, yoshua would always snipe out reavers trying to attack us who thought we were easy prey, our magriders always had so many bulletholes and blastmarks all over it, i loved the fact that damage decals stayed on the tanks even after you repaired them

we generally had about a 30:1 kd ratio when we did tank stuff, i have all of my roadkill badges, and i wear them proudly

What I did when I didn't feel like killing people myself was load up a Galaxy or an Ant or something else and just go full support for my team.

I do hope a potential sequel has more of those "support" options

The sequel also needs 100% fewer orbital strikes.

I mean, I get the reasoning, and giving them to some sort of commander would be fine, but I felt really bad for the guys driving the AMS, getting no real glory or thanks, who run all the way out to the fringes of a hot zone, deploy it with care, try to guard it, and then get blown up along with their AMS because every mouth-breathing stealther and his dog has one.

My main issue with Planetside was that, as a casual player, there was very little there to make me care about winning or losing a specific skirmish; wait for a shuttle, get dropped near a base that looked like all the other bases, shoot mens and win or lose. Don't get shit for either scenario.

-- Incentives to defend bases. The way it went in PS1 is that defenders had literally zero incentive to stick around and actually hold a base. Instead, what you had was a game of musical chairs. While one team was capturing a base, the other team was abandoning it and hitting another base elsewhere. The best battles actually took place at guard towers, because holding those actually mattered.

I think the issue wasn't a lack of incentive, but a lack of any actual means of winning. You cannot win a battle on defense: the only way you can actually get people to stop attacking a base would be to capture THEIR base and cut off their means of attack. If you don't do that (and you don't, because you're defending), the best you can do is just stalemate the fight, with a "win" being them getting bored and leaving.

-- Incentives to defend bases. The way it went in PS1 is that defenders had literally zero incentive to stick around and actually hold a base. Instead, what you had was a game of musical chairs. While one team was capturing a base, the other team was abandoning it and hitting another base elsewhere. The best battles actually took place at guard towers, because holding those actually mattered.

I think the issue wasn't a lack of incentive, but a lack of any actual means of winning. You cannot win a battle on defense: the only way you can actually get people to stop attacking a base would be to capture THEIR base and cut off their means of attack. If you don't do that (and you don't, because you're defending), the best you can do is just stalemate the fight, with a "win" being them getting bored and leaving.

In games like Daoc and WAR you could totally "win" when defending and you would get rewarded for the defense. Win would either be hold off the attackers until they leave, or annhilate them by pushing out.

With more people sticking around to defend (due to increased rewards for defense) you could easily see those situations happening instead of the defenders getting bored and leaving or leaving to take somewhere else.

They would need to put some sort of time-cap on a base assault. Attackers have 20 minutes to take a base (or whatever).

If you've ever played the Wintergrasp scenario in World of Warcraft, Blizzard actually did a pretty good job of balancing it for attackers and defenders. The attackers are obviously focused on sacking the base and destroying the orb thing. The defenders have 2 objectives: hold the base, and shorten the timer by completing some outlying side missions (i.e. destroying towers). This worked great, because it gave the defenders a bit of incentive to go on the counter-attack, raze a tower, and lower the siege timer in the process.

They would need to put some sort of time-cap on a base assault. Attackers have 20 minutes to take a base (or whatever).

If you've ever played the Wintergrasp scenario in World of Warcraft, Blizzard actually did a pretty good job of balancing it for attackers and defenders. The attackers are obviously focused on sacking the base and destroying the orb thing. The defenders have 2 objectives: hold the base, and shorten the timer by completing some outlying side missions (i.e. destroying towers). This worked great, because it gave the defenders a bit of incentive to go on the counter-attack, raze a tower, and lower the siege timer in the process.

I could see some sort of objective based attack for planetside as well, bases having a shield that prevented attackers from getting in unless they took down the shield, once the shield was down you would have 30min(or so) to take the base otherwise the shield would come back up again.

Shield could be bypass by single soliders equiped with a kit that would allow them to bypass shield (perhaps stealth as well.. not sure might be a bit much.)

not sure if the shields would be able to be taken down just by infantry or by weapon fire. Perhaps have nearby towers and such providing power to the shield so when they drop the shield gets weaker?

Just throwing ideas out there.

darkmayo on May 2010

0

citizen059hello my name is citizenI'm from the InternetRegistered Userregular

One of the main problems I saw was that certain tactical options were taken off the table in battle because people wanted to level up. Often it wasn't as much about winning as it was grinding out a nice, long battle.

If you dared to drop a gen somewhere you were almost at the level of a traitor. Never made sense to me, at least in terms of winning the battles. I mean I get the whole XP grind MMO thing, sure...it just seemed like PS should've been about something else.

The outfit I wound up with was what made the game for me, though. We were Vanu, led by a couple of military veterans who ran a very tight operation; you did what they expected when they ordered it, or you were out. Generally we went in with no larger a group than what a galaxy could hold and would do "special ops" type strikes against targets of value.

So say Vanu were trying to establish a foothold on a map owned by another faction, we'd have one or two bases on the map...our group would travel to the various structures behind the lines, like a tech plant, drop in, drop the generator to deny advanced vehicle support, and then HOLD the gen room as long as we could. I'll be the first to admit I wasn't a stellar player but the guys running the outfit were scary good, and as long as we all listened to them and did exactly what they told us to do, we were very effective.

My main issue with Planetside was that, as a casual player, there was very little there to make me care about winning or losing a specific skirmish; wait for a shuttle, get dropped near a base that looked like all the other bases, shoot mens and win or lose. Don't get shit for either scenario.

Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but... fun?

I can get the same amount of fun from any arena shooter, and they don't require a subscription.

my glory days was when i played with yoshua here on the forums, we both were vanu and i was a magrider pilot.

I loved driving that tank, and I rarely if ever used it to run over people. Got fairly good at it too, I could one alive through multiple base captures if played carefully enough. Always been looking for another planetside, I remember getting the beta discs for this game and playing it through release for awhile. I gave it another go after core combat but it wasn't the same and never tried after that last subscription. Some of the early days were never recreated due to population, there was nothing like having 10+ galaxies load up and do massive drops on a base. As you started to steam roll through a continent eventually the defense would see what's going on and a few bases in you'd get some resistance till there'd be huge battles for each base.

My main issue with Planetside was that, as a casual player, there was very little there to make me care about winning or losing a specific skirmish; wait for a shuttle, get dropped near a base that looked like all the other bases, shoot mens and win or lose. Don't get shit for either scenario.

Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but... fun?

I can get the same amount of fun from any arena shooter, and they don't require a subscription.

Its mostly a personal preference thing I suppose. I personally get a kick out of large, combined arms types of MMO sized FPS/Sim-ish games. It sort of boggles my mind that noone has really stepped up to fill that niche, at all. If you want a MMO-fps-sim-warfare kind of game, its either PlanetSide(on life support/arcadey) or WW2 Online(Also on life support/harcore sim). There is no 800lb gorilla of a game to compete with here, A la WOW.

My main issue with Planetside was that, as a casual player, there was very little there to make me care about winning or losing a specific skirmish; wait for a shuttle, get dropped near a base that looked like all the other bases, shoot mens and win or lose. Don't get shit for either scenario.

Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but... fun?

I can get the same amount of fun from any arena shooter, and they don't require a subscription.

Nothing against arena shooters, but PlanetSide does not play at all like one (though some complexity was lost with the population dropping below levels necessary to fuel multiple continent-scale fights).

I was always kind of surprised that people wanted a "goal". Generally my goal when playing was to kick the hated NC or TR off whichever continent I hot-dropped onto. Securing a continent lock was basically a "win", aside from just the fun of attacking/defending bases (and of course, killing NC and TR).

Now, that said, I would not be against more clearly denoted "win" conditions. I imagine it is something they will explore with PSII while they're developing it.

I think the Planetside world was just too big to support the playerbase and the expansions increasing the size of the world made it even worse. I only played for a few months right after launch but once that free month launch period ended and the people count dropped the game got really boring.

I'd like to see a real MMOFPS as well that truly captures the sense and immersion of warfare with real consequences for failure to defend or attack and for death.

The problem with that is if you aren't really, really careful about how you balance it you end up with a situation where a significant percentage of the population doesn't want to fight unless they have a massive roll lined up. You even see this in WW2 Online where they recently had to alter the game mechanics a bit to keep people from winning entire maps by simply capturing empty towns when there wasn't enough of the other side on to keep them all covered. The last time I played, the Axis side won a map simply by capturing huge numbers of towns in the "aussie" time zone, when they generally had a population advantage of the allies. You get a few Axis guys who are more dedicated to winning a map than actually having a fight, they sit and attack a town with 2-3 guys over a period of 3-4 hours and eventually the allied defenders get tired of playing a boring ass "Stare at a wall, then chase a single axis soldier around the town benny hill style, rinse repeat" game for several hours and just leave. It got to the point that the massive, grueling fights for frontline towns during US-UK primetime meant nothing because they would just cap those towns and then 2-3 towns beyond them 8 hours later.

1)It needed something like a campaign server, where you would have large scale scenarios that might go on for a month or so that one faction could "win."

2)It needed a way to have vehicular combat away from bases. There were tons of neat choke points and terrain all over those maps that hardly ever came into play.

3)Being an infantry guy trying to achieve objectives was the least fun part of the game. You were basically fodder for everyone else. It was so much easier just to jump in a max and farm mosquito's, than to actually contribute meaningfully to the battle.

I had some fun times in that game though. Last trial they had, I was fooling around with being an engie, and I came across a 2 man BFR that had gotten stuck in some terrain and abandoned. So I repped it up and started gunning, and ended up sitting there for 20 mins shooting for a bit and repping when needed. I didn't kill much, but I was able to deny a bridge to a significant opposing force for a remarkably long time in this stationary BFR.

I played for a good bit when it first came out and then got tired of it. When I came back I was pretty disappointed with the change to the shuttles that they made. As some of you probably remember when it was in beta/first came out, you usually had groups marshalling up at the hubs and you would have large groups of combined forces air and ground roll out into a continent. I don't recall exactly but I remember the shuttles were on a longish timer (maybe 15 minutes) and then you would probably drop in alone somewhere and have to find a fight.

The game originally seemed to incentivize group tactics, but when they changed the shuttles to launch something like every minute, it just got to the point that you would drop in on some random hot zone, and when you started to get bored there you'd just die off and drop in on some other hot zone somewhere else. It never felt like you were really tied into the action, it became more like some sort of team deathmatch than when it first started.

I'd like to see a real MMOFPS as well that truly captures the sense and immersion of warfare with real consequences for failure to defend or attack and for death.

The problem with that is if you aren't really, really careful about how you balance it you end up with a situation where a significant percentage of the population doesn't want to fight unless they have a massive roll lined up. You even see this in WW2 Online where they recently had to alter the game mechanics a bit to keep people from winning entire maps by simply capturing empty towns when there wasn't enough of the other side on to keep them all covered. The last time I played, the Axis side won a map simply by capturing huge numbers of towns in the "aussie" time zone, when they generally had a population advantage of the allies. You get a few Axis guys who are more dedicated to winning a map than actually having a fight, they sit and attack a town with 2-3 guys over a period of 3-4 hours and eventually the allied defenders get tired of playing a boring ass "Stare at a wall, then chase a single axis soldier around the town benny hill style, rinse repeat" game for several hours and just leave. It got to the point that the massive, grueling fights for frontline towns during US-UK primetime meant nothing because they would just cap those towns and then 2-3 towns beyond them 8 hours later.

So don't allow different regions to play on the same server. Sucks for people that are friends across the seas, but oh well. The balance of the game is more important than a very small minority of people from the US that want to play with friends from Europe or elsewhere.

I'd like to see a real MMOFPS as well that truly captures the sense and immersion of warfare with real consequences for failure to defend or attack and for death.

The problem with that is if you aren't really, really careful about how you balance it you end up with a situation where a significant percentage of the population doesn't want to fight unless they have a massive roll lined up. You even see this in WW2 Online where they recently had to alter the game mechanics a bit to keep people from winning entire maps by simply capturing empty towns when there wasn't enough of the other side on to keep them all covered. The last time I played, the Axis side won a map simply by capturing huge numbers of towns in the "aussie" time zone, when they generally had a population advantage of the allies. You get a few Axis guys who are more dedicated to winning a map than actually having a fight, they sit and attack a town with 2-3 guys over a period of 3-4 hours and eventually the allied defenders get tired of playing a boring ass "Stare at a wall, then chase a single axis soldier around the town benny hill style, rinse repeat" game for several hours and just leave. It got to the point that the massive, grueling fights for frontline towns during US-UK primetime meant nothing because they would just cap those towns and then 2-3 towns beyond them 8 hours later.

So don't allow different regions to play on the same server. Sucks for people that are friends across the seas, but oh well. The balance of the game is more important than a very small minority of people from the US that want to play with friends from Europe or elsewhere.

The game originally seemed to incentivize group tactics, but when they changed the shuttles to launch something like every minute, it just got to the point that you would drop in on some random hot zone, and when you started to get bored there you'd just die off and drop in on some other hot zone somewhere else. It never felt like you were really tied into the action, it became more like some sort of team deathmatch than when it first started.